Apparently mom's neighbor has admitted to being the one who stole mom's identity and that she did all of the charges. This means that she owes mom more than $4,000. Mom, of course, hear's the neighbor's plight about having an ex-husband force her to use mom's card by threatening her kids. So mom is like, don't get her in trouble she cooks my dinners and helps me and is pregnant with high blood pressure and two kids. So the neighbor admitted to it and says she is going to pay mom in cash a little at a time to get it paid off(during which time the interest will continue to accrue). And then when I tell mom what she needs to do with the credit card company she is all confused. It is frustrating, like mom doesn't want to deal with this at all. I think maybe she knows her neighbor helping her could be coming to an end.

The problem is that there are many scenerios that can be played here, all with pain involved. The easiest for me would be if we could somehow transfer the entire balance over to the neighbor and let it affect their credit and they are responsible for the whole thing. Mom should not be involved. The other scenerios involve the credit card company calling the cops on the neighbor and sending her to jail, during which time the neighbor's big husband won't be too happy. Heck the credit card company does have investigators on it already. They have probably figured it out anyways. So mom would in effect be fueding with the people who help her. And they could in turn steal stuff from her house if one of them goes to jail and they blame me and mom for it. I would rather mom move out of the house into an assisted living place near me where she is safe from that. The major problem with that is that mom has said she would only move into a place like that if she got too sick to care for herself. She would resist right now.

I also have to think about it from her point of view. I know I wouldn't want to move out of my house. Mom is super attached to all of her stuff. She would never want to not have it nearby and an assisted living place would be much smaller than her house. It is going to happen eventually, but in my experience waiting for as long as possible is wise. Grandpa was living in such places for at least 10-20 years in his old age. Mom has cleared the old person hump where you are stable doing nothing and slowly decline over many years. People tell me that an incident has to happen before you need assisted living, like falling down and breaking a hip or not being able to physically care for yourself. Technically this could be an issue, but I am not sure. So I don't know what to do. Time has a way of making decisions if you let it. That path leads to disgruntled neighbors in jail and mom moving out because of it. I don't know if I should stop it or not. What do you think?